The ID Research Program Legacy
by Steve PetermannIt is often claimed that before the intelligent design movement can be considered a scientific enterprise it must have a research program. Even ID proponents admit that currently there isn't much of a research program in place. Still, there are current efforts to explore an ID oriented approach to research like Jonathan Well's TOPS and Mike Gene's considerations here.
While it may be true that a research program associated with the ID movement is in its infancy, I suggest that the current efforts are actually part of an incredibly long and extremely productive line of ID research dating back millennia.
The type of ID research I'm talking about is carried on everyday by all sorts of disciplines. Probably the easiest way to illustrate this program is with engineering. If one aspect of ID research is to examine artifacts for design features with the intent of understanding design strategies, methods, processes, etc. this happens everyday in the engineering arena.
It is a well known "compulsion" of design engineers to deconstruct designs they see in everyday life. I remember my first tour of a modern canning facility. As an engineer I had a hard time keeping up with the tour because of my compulsion to understand and backwards engineer the marvelous machines I saw there. This sort of behaviour is, however, just what engineers are also expected to do in their jobs. Engineers are often tasked with improving, modifying, or replacing existing designs. It is typically not possible to talk to the original design engineers to understand why they designed as they did. Instead the engineer must examine the "artifact", utilizing her own understanding of design to extrapolate what she needs to proceed. From that process the engineer not only learns things about those designs but also may come up with new ideas and approaches.
The same thing happens in virtually every creative discipline. This type of ID research is present every time a composer deconstructs the works of others to advance the art of composition. Every time a fledgling writer puzzles over great literary works to understand the process of writing, ID research is in play. Every time a scientist deconstructs the "artifacts" of past explorations to advance the art of doing science, they are doing ID research.
Unquestionably the processes of evolution have done an incredible job of navigating the dangerous and circuitous biological paths in time to create the organismic marvels we see. To this engineer those biological artifacts absolutely shout design. If that is in fact the case, it will behoove us to carry on the ID research legacy of the past into the biological arena as well. Not only will it speed our understanding of those systems but also greatly inform our sense of design as we gain more power to heal, improve, and redesign the biological world.
